


The Poetry of the Curveball

by Maidenjedi



Category: West Wing
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-26
Updated: 2011-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 01:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toby Ziegler swings for the fences. He misses, a lot.  (set in "17 People")</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Poetry of the Curveball

Someone would complain about the noise, eventually. Ginger or Bonnie. Sam.

The ball hitting the wall didn't relieve Toby one iota. It simply lent a rhythm to the chaos. Hoynes. Nashua. Hoynes. Nashua.

New Hampshire.

Primaries.

Over and over.

\--

A seasoned campaign veteran like Toby Ziegler didn't come cheap, even if he hadn't ever won an election. He knew numbers, and he knew polling, and he knew speechifying. His first race had been with a Democrat running for senator in one of the Midwestern states that all looked alike when you drove through them, and it had been a barn burner. Every thing that could go wrong did. Toby never stopped believing the polls were wrong, and when they lost, he got drunk for a week and emerged a student of political science. He could have gotten a Ph. D., but he didn't want to teach, he wanted to change things that no one ever talked about in a classroom.

After graduating, Toby turned his attention to smaller races, Congressional seats and state assembly seats in the places where there hadn't been elected Democrats since the Civil War. He carried his idealism like a chip on his shoulder - but damn, he knew things. Like what the local city council in Podunk, West Virginia had done on a smoking ban initiative, and what the breakdown was of voting, registered Republicans and Democrats was on tax increase referenda to pay for parks was in Backwater, Georgia. He could sell the least sexy portions of health care reform in a speech to hungover Harvard undergraduates, and they'd be motivated enough to flier the campus the next day.

He just had a habit, Leo believed, of dying on the sword. And that was why Leo wanted him to come help elect a good man to the White House.

\--

If Toby Ziegler worked for John Hoynes....

Well, Toby never thought about it. Hoynes was the kind of politician that made a person feel the need to shower after meeting him.

But he was thinking about it now. If he was working for Hoynes, he would be watching Jed Bartlet. He would be watching polls in Bartlet districts, he'd be working Congressional contacts on every budget bill and every social issue and every defense appropriation that could be spun and reworked to make Bartlet sound soft one day and too hawkish the next.

If Toby Ziegler worked for John Hoynes, a presidential campaign would have been born a year ago. If he could be certain, positive that Bartlet wasn't going to run for a second term.

The ball hit the bookcase that time and dropped to the floor.

Hoynes knew something. Leo knew something.

Toby picked the ball up, and kept going. Thud, whack, thud, whack.

Leo knew something.

Toby put the ball on his desk, put his jacket on, straightened his tie, and walked straight to Leo's office.

\--

C.J. had told him, back when they were working some lieutenant governor's race that would end 80-20 in favor of the other guy, that he had a problem seeing the bad ending coming.

"You always think it will end well. You always think you're working for Zeus. When really, you're working for a lesser god. The kind that get punished in the stars."

She'd been laughing at him, because the polling had not gone well and the speech was executed so badly that he wondered why he bothered writing.

Six failed campaigns later, and C.J. on the other side of the country and not speaking to him, Toby no longer thought he was working for Zeus. He was just glad if he was working at all.

\--

Toby liked the carpet in the Oval Office. He wasn't really the kind of person who normally noticed such things, but he noticed it here. It was difficult not to, every inch of this place being steeped in history just because of where it was. Just like him, just like Bartlet. History because of where they were.

He became aware that the carpet was dirty, smudged just a little, right near his foot.

"What does relapsing-remitting mean?"

He knew, oh, he knew the answer to that question, but he wanted to hear him say it. The son-of-a-bitch. Whose carpet wasn't clean.

Toby couldn't sit, he could barely keep his countenance, and it took a lot of energy not to scream.

Air, blessed air, but it choked him. He was thinking about failed campaign number three. Edie Rowle, candidate for the Florida 10th, found out she had breast cancer four weeks before election day. Which might have been fine, it wasn't aggressive and she could still work, and Toby thought they might actually gain momentum because who was going to carry on a character attack on a sick woman. But then it came out she'd actually been sick for a year, and she hadn't told anyone, and while Edie Rowle did recover and go on to live a long and happy life, she didn't do it as Congresswoman Rowle because the voters wondered what else she was covering up.

He went back in. Who else knows, he said. And how long, he thought.

\--

When he was eight years old, Toby learned how to play baseball. He knew how to watch, before that. Knew that the swish of the bat and the thud of a well-placed strike were poetry.

He wanted to learn to make poetry.

His bat never quite swished, but he could throw a curve ball. A mean one.

There were Jews in the majors. Sure there were. He could be one, too.

At eleven, he shattered his elbow falling down the icy stairs of a friend's parents' Brooklyn brownstone. His pitching career (starter for the Yankees, you better believe it) was over before it ever had a chance to begin.

But after his arm healed, he played catch. And some street ball.

He liked the sound the ball made when it hit things. All the crap with his father, his doubts every Sabbath  
as he was more often dragged to temple than not - it slowed when he threw, it dulled so he could think about  
how he was going to get out one day. Not the bigs, maybe, but he'd get out of Brighton Beach and away from here.

\--

"I wasn't in that situation room that night, but I'll bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that it was Leo, who no one elected! For ninety minutes that night there was a coup d'etat in this country!"

And his blood boiled, his heart pounded in his ears, and there was a bitter taste on his tongue. He wanted a drink, it was the kind of want that meant he wouldn't stop until he was very, very drunk. The bourbon, or sour mash, or whatever the fuck Bartlet was drinking, looked good. And poisoned.

Toby's hand flexed. He could throw a mean curve right now. Right through that wall.

\--

"Here's to the next eight years!!"

Some young campaign staffer shouted it, and cheers erupted, but Toby and Leo made sure everyone else knew not  
to shout things like that, not if the press could hear. They'd just done the impossible, and they didn't want  
to overplay their hand just yet.

But President-Elect Bartlet smiled wide, he high-fived the staffer, and the buzz began before the night had  
ended. And Toby's policy was to just nod, shrug, and change the subject.

In his heart, though.

For the whole campaign, Toby kept a folder of clippings from newspapers and magazines declaring a liberal like Bartlet couldn't win, that this country was center-right and even if they were leaning left as a nation, it wasn't going to happen overnight. He had an issue of The New Republic that had proclaimed John Hoynes the savior of the Democratic Party and the United States and possibly humanity itself.

The day after the election, he took pains to shred each and every page in that folder.

His days of losing, of backing lesser gods and being shocked, shocked when they were placed in the sky upside down for eternity, were over.

\--

Toby's problem was, really, that he expected these men and women to be gods at all.

They were just men and women. Just people.

\--

 

"You don't have to break the law to be served with the articles of impeachment."

He only said it because he was sure that the word had never crossed Leo's lips. And the way Leo refuted the very idea was telling.

Toby didn't like the thought of impeachment. It carried with it such incredible shame and fear; it was so odious that Nixon had run rather than face it. But more than those things, he felt like impeachment did not go far enough. If you don't have to break the law to be impeached, he thought, than what was the point of enforcing the law to begin with?

He also just hated the word, the way it hit the tongue. Like a curse.

\--

"Do you think you can stand still long enough to get married?" Her voice was light, notes of unoffensive music that might be played to calm the mad. He felt mad, downright crazy, but she did not calm him. She lit him on fire.

Andi Wyatt proposed to Toby Ziegler, and the sun might actually have shone brighter and longer for at least that day. Toby was not above such flights of fancy.

They got married, and they were happy, and if Toby sometimes wondered if it would last he never told her, he let her build castles in the sky and watched her put furniture in them. She decided to run for Congress and asked him to run her campaign, and he declined so she asked Reed Dewar, and it didn't matter if Reed Dewar was thirty-five and built like an Olympic swimmer. It didn't.

Except there were long hours (it was a campaign!) and there were "have-to-take-this" phone calls at midnight, and she wasn't home all that much and Toby wondered. He honestly wondered.

So he slept with C.J.

It didn't happen just like that, but that was the way Andi told it when she reminded him of it during the divorce. It had been rotten for awhile, inside, under the fleshy peach skin that convinced people all was well. Toby could see Andi bite her tongue on a question about whether C.J. had ever gotten pregnant, because that was low, that was going too far. Andi liked C.J., she knew it was never about her, but there was an edge to her exhaustion. She wanted something to blame. She made it about Toby, Toby's sins, Toby's faults. She apologized later, when the papers were signed.

It wasn't about you, she said.

But really, Toby decided it was about him. He was the reason this failed. Reed Dewar, guys like him, they made the world work and well. Guys like Toby? Made it unravel.

\--

The day after, Toby walked to Josh's office. He asked about some crime bill in the Senate, something he knew the answer to (Toby always knew the answers - that was why Leo hired him). Josh, bleary-eyed from the long night speech-composing, mumbled the answer and went back to reading a stack of papers on domestic partnership benefits for an upcoming battle in the House. Toby didn't leave, though. He got up and stood in the doorway, watching Donna at her desk.

True believers, these two. If Donna had wandered in to Toby's desk in that campaign office, she would have been barked at and made to feel so small she would never come back to politics. Toby had little patience for true believers, the bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed aspiring politicos who answered phones for pennies and peanuts.

He was struck, though, by a memory of himself at Donna's age. What he would have given to sit where she was now. He had been a true believer, he'd spent a winter, two really, knee-deep in show in Iowa. Answered phones and typed memos and talked to grammies in nightgowns who pinched his cheeks and told him stories about Franklin Roosevelt that were really about Harry Truman but they didn't know the difference. He would have killed to work in the White House then.

If someone had told him, the imaginary him at twenty-six in Donna's chair, that he was working for a liar, that he'd been hoodwinked by fancy talk into promoting a sneaking, power-hungry liar like Jed Bartlet, he might not have cared. It might have been enough to make history.

It might not have, though. It might have been the end of the world.

"Toby? Something you need?" Josh's voice was hesitant, like he knew he'd talked to Toby before but wasn't sure Toby remembered.

He turned around, shook his head. "No. I'll catch you later, Josh."

\--

There was a scrappy Jewish kid in Brooklyn, playing baseball one day with his friends. It was bitterly cold out, just a couple days after a nasty ice storm shut down the city for a bit, kept the kids home from school. But it was March, and spring wasn't that far off, not in their minds. They hit and pitched and ran (slid) the bases on deserted streets.

Carl Gerstmann's mother invited them all in for hot chocolate. The aforementioned kid, whose friends called him Toby and who mother called him Tobias, was the only one who could stay. His dad was working nights and his sisters weren't too concerned. His mother just wanted him home by dark.

Carl and Toby talked about spring training - the Yanks were down in Florida, far away from the late-season ice and gearing up for a great season. They were excited to see what kind of year Stottlemyre was going to have; Toby loved talking pitching with Carl, who usually played catcher and understood how a well-thrown curve ball had the kind of beauty that even Babe Ruth would appreciate and defer to. That's what they told themselves, anyway.

They made plans to go to opening day, if Carl's mom Joanie would agree to come with them (she often did, and she always bought them Cracker Jacks). It was on this ecstatic promise of spring that Toby left their home.

And fell down the stairs, the ice black from two days of melting and refreezing. Toby always remembered this as his failure to remember, his failure to walk carefully, failure failure failure.

Shattered elbow.

He didn't go to a single Yankees game that year, and had to stay inside so much that he actually began to like studying and reading.

Mel Stottlemyre won 21 games, and the Yanks still didn't win the pennant.

Toby always wondered if he would forget how to pitch a curve ball. He never really forgot how to hit one.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tenyearsoftww. Special thanks must go to pocky_slash and inocciduous for hosting and to my husband for beta and putting up with hours of rewatch. I wrote this about Toby, but I think I can be excused for choosing this episode just to rewatch "If you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for red lights" about a thousand times. Eleven-year-old Toby is concerned about the 1968 Yankees; I tried to match that as closely as possible with series canon. I got the inspiration for him from Brighton Beach Memoirs - the kid in that, of course, is obsessed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but they moved to L.A. in 1957 and couldn't fit in the story (besides which, Toby is a devout Yankees fan, as we all know from the time Andi dated an Oriole).


End file.
